This week I had the honor of sitting down with the writing/directing team, Matt Mercer and Mike Testin, of the upcoming balls-to-the-wall horror-comedy, Dementia: Part II. Following a maintenance worker on a routine house call, the one hour and seven-minute rollercoaster ride unravels a true evil under a seemingly harmless woman’s dark secret.
But it wasn’t all blood and gore.
The inception of this “sequel” can be credited to a serendipitous moment at Fright Fest.
“This was a challenge from the festival to go from zero to a completed film in five weeks. We only had about a week to write, meanwhile, we were also working on separate projects out of state. We tried to send scripts back and forth until it was something that had a tone that we felt we could pull off with the limited resources we had,” explains Testin.
With such limited time and resources, the team heavily relied on their own personal writing strengths to get to the finish line.
Mercer recounts, “Mike is good at dialogue and I am good at horror. We wrote out three or four ideas and settled on this film. It’s exploitation tongue and cheek. Our goal for this film was to do a complete 180 from the last one.”
Additionally, the actual process of writing is different for both of them, for which Testin offers a related scenario.
“I use Final Draft. I have a broken-down Macbook that doesn’t have internet, so I can go anywhere and write without being bogged down. For me, writing is tough because I need such a large chunk of time before I can get anything down. It has to build up. For Dementia: Part II, I was able to have a full weekend to write and then I went on a job, and that’s when Matt took over. I also like to write to jazz.”
Music also plays into Mercer's process, who credits fellow horror movie scores to his writing success.
“It really helps me to concentrate. The one I listen to the most is the original Day of the Dead [soundtrack]. I prefer to jump right in and bang out a couple of scriptments. Final Draft definitely made it easy to pass the script back and forth.”
When asked about what advice they would give to their younger writer selves, Testin led the charge with a simple, yet vital tip:
“You kind of have to plow through and not overthink it. Regardless of how the first draft is, you still have to keep going and rewrite. It’s very common to get stuck around the second act. Everyone can usually imagine the first and third acts, but you have to push through and make something happen in complete form.”
To that note, Mercer adds, “I was hamstrung and avoided doing a lot of writing because I was afraid of failing or sharing my work. You are going to fail, you have to get used to that. Just start writing."
Dark Star Pictures and Bloody Disgusting will release the midnight horror film Dementia: Part II in theatres on May 21st, 2021, and on VOD, Digital HD and DVD on June 1st, 2021.